Category: chores

Daydream Believer

Thursday morning, Constant Reader–we’ve almost made it through the week, and the Carnival parades start tomorrow night! Woo-hoo! I am more excited about this than I probably should be, but I am also going to be on vacation for the entire second week of parades, which means this is the first year I am not going to have to deal with getting to and from work around the parades, and being bone-tired exhausted from all the walking I’ll have to do to get to and from work.

Huzzah!

I did manage to get that chapter finished yesterday, and will try to get another one done today–at least one. Today is, of course, a half-day; I am going to probably stop at Rouse’s on my way home from work to get some things, and will have to make groceries tomorrow in the afternoon as well. Today’s grocery run will be minor; mostly to get a few odds and ends, while tonight I will make a thorough list to get us through until next Wednesday, which will be the next time I’ll get to stop at the grocery store. Then again, we do have a tendency to eat a lot of corn dogs and funnel cakes during the parades…yay for healthy eating!

Last night when we got home from work, we talked about panels and scheduling for Saints and Sinners–Paul’s been working very hard lately, and continuing to work when we get home, so we haven’t really had much chance to hang out and reconnect for the last month or so; so last night was rather lovely.

Yesterday was a tragic day for us New Orleanians; a beautiful historic old home on St, Charles Avenue, commonly known as the “Rex House”–a former King of Rex lived there, and it had become tradition for the Rex parade to stop in front of it so the current King could toast the family there–caught fire and burned. It was a five alarm fire; it took six hours to get under control, and you could literally smell smoke all day all over Uptown; we could still smell it when we got home last night. (Several years ago an abandoned historic church a few blocks away from us also caught fire and the blaze lasted for hours; interestingly enough, where that church once was is now condos.) This made me think about fires in New Orleans. I’ve written two books built around famous fires in New Orleans–Jackson Square Jazz and Murder in the Rue Chartres–and this reminded me that in the first years we lived here, there had been an arsonist in our neighborhood. I don’t remember if the arsonist was ever caught, but the fires stopped. Fires are taking very seriously here, and arson is one of the worst crimes one could commit here; with our old wooden homes and buildings, it’s not difficult for fires to spread and become horrifying conflagrations. Our fire department doesn’t get nearly enough love or appreciation here–they do get quite a bit, but it’s never enough, frankly. It wouldn’t be too difficult for the entire city to go up in flames…Christopher Rice wrote about that in his debut novel, A Density of Souls, where a bomb went off in a gay bar in the Quarter and the explosion spread the fire. I remember reading the first sentence of the chapter after the bomb went off: The French Quarter was burning. 

Just typing those words gave me the shivers.

And now, I am going to finish cleaning the dishes and get ready for my short day at work. Have a lovely day Constant Reader!

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I Can’t Tell You Why

Wednesday morning, and it’s also pay day–on which I pay the bills and watch all the money I worked so hard for vanish in the blink of an eye. I cannot believe in two days the first parades will roll down St. Charles Avenue…which means when I get off work on Friday I need to run all my errands, because making groceries will be an impossibility over the course of the weekend–at least until Sunday night. But then…I only have to work two days next week, and then I am on vacation until Ash Wednesday.

Woo-hoo! Vacation!

I only got halfway through yesterday’s chapter; I was tired last night after a second long day at the office–I didn’t even watch another episode of Versailles, and was also too tired to read. My short days are coming up, though, and I should be able to get caught up on my reading and my revising over the course of the rest of the week…bearing in mind there are parades this weekend. Oshun and Cleopatra are Friday night, and there are five on Saturday–Ponchartrain, Choctaw, Freret, Sparta and Pygmalion. Sunday there are four: Femme Fatale, Carrollton, King Arthur, and Alla.

There will be beads.

But the true madness begins next week.

I seem to be having some trouble this morning getting motivated; I am feeling lazy this morning. Perhaps it is a lack of caffeine, perhaps it’s just a holdover from the last two length work days, I don’t know. The weather took a strange turn yesterday. It was chilly and wet in the morning before raining all afternoon. Usually, this means another drop in temperature at this time of year…yet the fog rolled in and when I left the office last night it was extremely humid and warm. My car windows were all fogged up, as were my windows here at the Lost Apartment…and the sweater I’d worn because it was chilly was too heavy and hot. I have no idea what I should wear to work today…maybe a sweater over a T-shirt, so I can remove the sweater if it gets too warm. My windows are covered in condensation, which means it’s much warmer outside than in.

So, I just looked at the weather. It’s 72 degrees right now and the low is 63. Yeah, probably no sweater today after all.

All right, I am going to try to finish revising that chapter before work. Back to the spice mines!

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Rise

Sunday! Yesterday I braved the AT&T store and upgraded my phone. It’s kind of cool. I wanted a red one, but had to settle for silver as they were out of red. Maybe next time.

I didn’t really want a new phone, but since it’s a lease–which I really am not sure I understand how that works, but whatever–it was overdue for a replacement. Other than the lengthy wait–and the usual irritating length of time it always takes for Apple operating systems to load and so forth–it wasn’t that bad. And now I have a new phone.

Now I need to get that pesky brake tag, and I’ll be all set. DON’T JUDGE ME.

I also put some books away in storage, and filed away the last few editions of manuscripts I’ve worked on over the last year. I still have to figure out where that extra seventy dollars in my checking account came from, do my taxes, and clear out all my emails…heavy heaving sigh.

But despite the limited progress on anything of merit yesterday, I am refusing to berate myself as per the usual. I work forty hours a week, after all, and write around my job. I don’t quite have the energy I used to have, so recharging a bit on the weekend is necessary and also kind of the only time I have to do it. So, having a low-energy not get a lot of writing done day is kind of work; I need to recharge in order to get the work done.

I also began reading Lori Roy’s Gone Too Long and once again, I am completely blown away at her mastery of language. She truly has mastered what I think of as Southern Gothic, and when I am reading her work I am always reminded of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Gone Too Long has also come along at precisely the right time in my reading; it’s about the Klan in Georgia. One of the things I love about Roy’s work is how patiently and deftly she plays her cards, never letting you know anything you don’t need to know until you absolutely need to know it; there’s also a haunting, dream-like quality to her work that I wish I could figure out how to do myself, quite frankly. I am savoring the book, and not wanting to rush through it. I read some more this morning with my second and third cups of coffee; and now am reluctantly putting it aside in order to get the work done I didn’t do yesterday.

Had I done the work yesterday, I could spend more time today reading Gone Too Long.

Which is yet another shining example of not putting off till tomorrow what you can do today because you will definitely regret it.

On the other hand, if I get everything done that I want to get done today, I can go back to reading it. I also want to finish reading a short story from Hauntings: Is There Anybody There?

Always so much to do, so little time in which to do it, and very little desire to get it done.

But I also got up early this morning, so there’s no excuse. If, for example, I buckle down and start writing now, I can be finished in a few hours and have the rest of the day to enjoy this book.

We also started watching Russian Doll last night, which is holding our interest–more so than The Umbrella Factory–and so we’ll probably delve into another episode of that this evening as well.

And on that note, tis back to the spice mines with me.

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Cool Change

Saturday morning and I slept late, which felt positively marvelous. I feel rested and ready to kick some ass and take some names–at least for now, at any rate. Paul is going to be out of the house most of the day–appointments and going to the office–and therefore I have the Lost Apartment to myself for most of the day and no excuse not to get a lot of things done. I am still planning on walking over to the AT&T store to replace my phone–who knows how that is going to go?–but other than that, my day is pretty much set for cleaning, revising, and reading.

Last night, we started watching the new Netflix show The Umbrella Academy, based on the Dark Horse comic series–and while I didn’t madly love it, I am curious enough to continue watching. For one thing, it has both Ellen Page and Tom Hopper (who I’ve been crushing madly on since his days as Billy Bones on Black Sails), and it has an interesting premise. We will be continuing with it tonight, I think. I had just started reading Lori Roy’s Gone Too Long when Paul got home last night, and then was distracted by getting caught up on How to Get Away with Murder and then The Umbrella Academy.

And I’ve been dealing with yet another Apple upgrade issue that has fucked with my desktop, laptop, phone and iPad since last night. Now the cloud drive is missing from both my desktop and my laptop (I managed to resolve the handheld device issues last night) and so am trying to get that resolved this morning. Seriously, Apple–when you update/upgrade your systems, is it absolutely necessary to fuck up everything for your customers? 

Seriously, Apple. Do better.

So I am trying to resolve all this before scheduling a call from Apple Support…which I also don’t understand; you used to be able to do this in an on-line chat, but now of course they make you take a phone call. Why, precisely? And how able-ist is this? What about those of us who are hard of hearing, or those who are deaf? Seriously, fuck you in the ass without lubrication, Apple. HARD.

Thank you for allowing me to vent about these issues, Constant Reader. It’s helping me reduce the future body count.

This week I got a copy of Kyle Onstott’s bestselling Mandingo from the 1950’s. As Constant Reader is aware, I’ve been trying to diversify not only my fiction reading but to learn more about the horrible history of race in North America. Part of this has taking an amorphous shape in my head around a lengthy essay, tracing revisionism of slavery and the Old South and civil rights from such novels as The Clansman (which was filmed as Birth of a Nation) to Gone with the Wind to To Kill a Mockingbird and The Klansman, which I recently reread. As I was scrolling through Amazon Prime looking for something to watch the other night, I came across the late 1970’s film Mandingo, and remembered that it was also a novel. I bought a copy from eBay which arrived this week (I wasn’t able to get far in the movie because it was just incredibly bad; not even campy bad, like Showgirls, just bad.) The book arrived this week and….just looking at the note from the publisher in the beginning was horrifying. Yet Mandingo might just be the only novel about slavery and the Old South that actually tears the veneer of respectability and gentility away and exposes the true horror of what the “peculiar institution” was actually like. (Even John Jakes’ dreadful North and South series never delved deeply into the actual horrors; Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad was one of the first novels to truly explore this that I’ve read.) Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War, also does a terrific job of exploring how deeply entrenched and horrible racism/slavery were.

This essay I am thinking about would probably wind up, should I ever have the time to read the books and write it (it would, for example, require a reread of Gone with the Wind and it’s over eleven hundred pages, as well as some in depth reading of actual history) would probably be a part of Gay Porn Writer: The Fictions of My Life…which is a project I really do want to work on someday.  Mandingo takes on an aspect of slavery and the South that is rarely, if ever, touched on in fictions: the sexual abuse of the female slaves by their masters (come on, like it never happened. Really?) as well as the breeding of actual slaves for better, more valuable stock, as well as raising them for fighting–kind of a human version of cock-fighting or dog-fighting. Is it more likely that never happened, or that it did? Slavery, as Harriet Beecher Stowe repeatedly explained in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, debases both slave and master; are we really supposed to believe that slave-owners didn’t abuse their ‘property’?

Given how people of color–theoretically free and equal in the eyes of the law in the twenty-first century–are treated in the present day, I’m not buying the notion of the kind, gracious slave owner.

Take, for example, this passage from the Publisher’s Note to the movie tie-in paperback edition which I just received in the mail:

From today’s vantage point,, almost a hundred years after the cataclysm, the developing situation may be viewed objectively. Actually, the finger of blame should be pointed at no one geographical group of people. Although the factions that promoted the abolition of slavery were ethically in the right (emphasis: mine), Southern planters in general are shown to have been victims of circumstance rather than diabolical tyrants as they have sometimes been painted. (again, emphasis mine.)

Doesn’t get more apologetic than that, does it? Those poor planters. (massive eye roll)

And is it any wonder that we still have so many societal problems of racial injustice today?

And on that note, back to the spice mines.

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On the Radio

So, it’s Friday and yet another week has passed by. Next Friday is the first parade day of this year’s Carnival madness…I cannot believe it is nigh upon us–and it’s late this year. Madness….Mardi Gras madness, to be exact.

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, so Paul got us Chinese take-out for dinner so I wouldn’t have to cook, which was lovely. I do enjoy some shrimp lo-mein. We then proceeded to watch this week’s Schitt’s Creek, which was terrific–the David/Patrick pairing is one of my favorite gay couples on any television series–and another episode of PEN15, which I think we’re going to let go of. Maybe if we were younger women, we’d get it and enjoy it more; I’m sure it’s a fine show–we simply aren’t the target audience for it, which is fine. Not every television show or movie or book, for that matter, is targeted to everyone.

Since I already ran my errands yesterday, I came straight home from the office today–it was a short day for me, which made getting up so early a little less painful. Huzzah!

Also, when I got home from work yesterday the house next door had been tented for termites. It was a little surreal looking out the window and seeing the house next door hidden beneath an enormous yellow-and-red tarp that more closely resembled a circus tent than anything else. (I’ve always wondered why the termite tarps/tents are yellow and red…but a google search proved that, while they are always striped, they aren’t always yellow and red.) This morning when I got up, I noticed that the clips holding it together near the back of the house had given way and there was a rather large gap; a mere ten minutes later I almost jumped out of my skin when the part in the front of the house came tumbling down–particularly because it was so early in the morning. As I wondered if I should call my landlady (she knows the woman who owns the house next door) the tarpaulin over the back of the house began moving, and over the top of the fence I saw some hands. Then I heard voices….and the rest of the tarp came down.

So yes, the termite assassins were un-tenting the house at that ungodly hour of the morning. Who knew?

So, as I sit here, the washing machine is chugging on the last load of blankets, and the second-to-last load of bed linens is tumbling in the dryer. There’s also a load of clothes to do, but it’s still early. I’ve also unloaded the dishwasher and reloaded it with what was in the sink. I am currently cleaning the coffee-maker, and will probably keep cleaning the kitchen a bit as I sit here. I am going to try to get a chapter done before I retire to the easy chair and Lori Roy’s ARC (#ilovemylife), and possibly another ghost short story from Hauntings: Is There Anybody There? by Norah Lofts. I am going to go to the AT&T store tomorrow to see if I can trade my phone in–it’s past time–and other than that, I intend to spend the weekend reading, revising, and cleaning. Maybe watching some fun stuff on the TV; there are all kinds of movies and TV shows available on the streaming services I pay for that I want to watch.

There are also some odds and ends here in the office/kitchen area–as well the tables around my easy chair–that I should just bite the bullet and do something with. I’ve been meaning to update my address book for Christmas cards and so forth forever; the Christmas cards I’ve been saving are piled up on top of one of the filing cartons. I’ve also apparently made an error of some sort in my checking account; the bank says I have more money than my register does, and everything has cleared that I recorded. This happens periodically because I absolutely hate to balance my checkbook, and it always, without fail, means I’ve deducted something twice–I’ll buy something on-line or pay a bill, and then I’ll record it in the register. Then a few days later I’ll check my account on-line because I know I’ve forgotten to record something small–like NyQuil–that I got at the CVS across the street from the office. I’ll then notice the other amount–whether a purchase or paid bill–and will record it again.

Sometimes there are multiple mistakes.

I also have a tendency to round up in my check register, so that there’s less money showing than I actually have (one of my biggest fears is bouncing a check or having my debit card be declined at a cash register), which also makes determining what the actual balance really is a problem to figure out.

And yes, I think I have delayed revising sufficiently long now.

So, without further ado, ’tis back to the spice mines with me.

Happy Friday, Constant Reader!

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Emotional Rescue

So, I managed to fill the plot hole yesterday, and while I am not entirely certain I did it correctly–i.e., there will be no further reverberations from it later on in the manuscript–I did get it done, and I made a note to watch for said reverberations later one. One highly amusing thing that did come up as I reworked the chapter–it just goes to show how, if you don’t write the chapter all in one sitting, you can make a mistake–I had a character wearing a red wrap dress in the beginning of the scene, and then later on Scotty talks about her tight black T-shirt and her black skinny jeans. Um, which is it? (I went with the wrap dress–because one can never go wrong with a wrap dress.)

I had to go into the office early this morning. I had a doctor’s appointment the other day in the middle of my long Tuesday, so I lost three hours I had to make up this morning. It wasn’t horrible–I’m getting used to getting up early, which is sort of terrifying and sort of not. The last few Fridays I’ve gone in and gotten my half-day over by one, and then run my errands and so forth, and that has been absolutely lovely. I made groceries today after work, and now I’m home. I’m going to finish the laundry and the dishes, hopefully before Paul gets home. We’re getting take-out for Valentine’s Day for dinner, which is quite lovely, and I am hoping to be able to relax and just do some reading tonight.

I should also work on the revision some before Paul comes home….or I could just wait and do it tomorrow afternoon…yes, laziness can sometimes be an issue.

But it’s been a good day, and I think I am going to just call it an evening.

Did I mention I’ve decided to read Lori Roy’s Gone Too Long next? I know, I’d said I was going to read Caleb Roehrig’s White Rabbit, but…them’s the breaks, and if I can get it read this weekend I can read Caleb’s book next week.

And on that note, tis back to the spice mines.

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We Don’t Talk Anymore

Sunday morning and all is well in the Lost Apartment. My kitchen and living room are clean–there is a load of laundry in the dryer that needs to be refluffed and folded, as well as a load in the dishwasher to put away–but most of my chores are done for the weekend. I can either do nothing chore-related today, or I can do a deep clean on something. I am leaning toward a deep clean on something–I rarely have the opportunity to do a deep clean so carpe diem–and it’s a lovely feeling.

I finally made myself start revising at some point yesterday in the war of wills between Scooter and me. I finally decided I could go read a bit as a break from revising, so as to satisfy his need for attention for a human (or rather having a human serve as a cat bed) and set the alarm on my iPad for an hour each time. This seemed to work, and not only did I revise five chapters I finished reading Devil in a Blue Dress. I then streamed the film through Amazon Prime, and the movie was also quite good. I’ll talk about the book some more, but am thinking it needs its own entry, so when I finish this one I’ll give it a proper review. I then decided to break from both the Diversity Project and The Short Story Project in order to read a book that’s been on everyone’s lips this past week–A. J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window. I am about fifty pages in, and it is indeed giving me something to think about.

The terrific thing about the revising is that the book isn’t nearly as terrible as I’ve convinced myself that it was during the long slogs of writing it. To be sure, I am finding repetitive sentences and badly constructed ones; I also am finding paragraphs that completely repeat information from a previous chapter that must be excised. But tying everything together isn’t nearly as difficult as I had thought it would be, and the behaviors of the characters and how they react to things actually make sense. I don’t know why I’ve been avoiding working on this. It’s going much faster and easier than I thought it would…I guess I was thinking it would be a lot of work. That doesn’t mean it won’t be again as I work my way through the manuscript…but I need to get this done, and I am going to dive back into after I write another entry–my review of Devil in a Blue Dress.

Depending how all the writing and revising goes, I may walk to the AT&T Store and replace my phone today. I’ve been meaning to do it for weeks…maybe today will be the day to get it handled. Or not. I hate dealing with that sort of thing, so I always put it off…hence it’s been weeks. Heavy heaving sigh.

And this is how things get backed up. Okay, I am definitely walking to the AT&T store today and getting my phone replaced.

And now, back to the spice mines.

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Heartache Tonight

Well, Constant Reader, it is mid-afternoon on Friday and I am home. I worked this morning, ran errands, put the groceries away, and am currently in the midst of laundering the bed linens. Scooter periodically howls at me because I clearly need to be sitting in my easy chair so he can nap on me, but I keep denying him…so he goes away for about ten minutes before returning to express his displeasure with me yet again. At some point–probably after emptying the dishwasher and washing the dishes currently in the sink, I will take a break. I will go into the living room with Devil in a Blue Dress, sit in my chair, and read for a little bit–giving Scooter what he wants. Then, after a chapter or two, I will get up again to do something–perhaps switching laundry loads from one appliance to another and to the empty basket–and he will curl up on the couch and sleep, sated, and forget that I’m even home.

Unless, of course, I vacuum. But I did that yesterday, so he’s in luck on that score.

Well, actually it was a noise outside that got Scooter up and out of my lap, and I am now back. I out-waited him; I heard the washer stop but continued reading. He has his glare face on now, but he won’t howl at me again since he was the one who got up.

I am really enjoying the book, though, and while I am deeply ashamed it’s taken me this long to read one of Mosley’s novels, I am enjoying it so much I won’t allow the shame to ruin it for me. And there’s such a backlist! I can savor his work for years to come without fear of running out of one I haven’t read–there’s nothing worse than having finished reading all the books an author has written and having to wait for a new one…unless of course they are no longer amongst the living. I keep putting off reading more of Shirley Jackson and Daphne du Maurier and Patricia Highsmith for that very reason. It’s insane, I know, but it makes perfect logical sense to me.

I stand corrected! I am being howled at from the doorway by a cat that wants me right NOW. Back in a bit.

Well, now it’s Saturday morning. I slept in this morning–I only woke up a couple of times during the night, which was lovely–and now I sit at my computer. Paul’s still sleeping so I have no battle of wills with the cat this morning; although Paul is planning on going into the office today, which means Scooter will slip into needy mode the minute the front door closes behind him. Heavy heaving sigh. But I read a lot more of Devil in a Blue Dress last night, which is really picking up steam. It’s really the origin story of how Easy Rawlins became a private eye, and I am really loving the way Mosley writes and tells the story…it also kind of reminds me of what I had in mind when I started writing Murder in the Rue Dauphine back in 1997. (Not that I would ever classify my work as being in the same league as Mosley’s; I just wish I’d read this before I started writing mine, as it would have been enormously helpful.)

I also got very tired last night–having the purring cat sleeping in my lap always makes me sleepy, even when I’m not really tired–so when I’m tired, watch out. I ended up watching a documentary about George V and Mary of Teck, and how they modernized the British monarchy to adapt to the first world war, and their issues with their children (who knew the current Queen had a gay/bisexual uncle? I did not), and then managed to stagger upstairs and make the bed before falling into a fabulous deep sleep. And here I am this morning, having accomplished nothing much last night, wondering how I am going to get everything finished this day that I want to finish.

Heavy heaving sigh. Same song, different day. Like always. But I am also going to repeat my last weekend methodology of closing my browser and staying off the Internet for as much of the day as possible, with a goal of only looking at it from time to time on either the phone or the iPad until tomorrow morning.

It really worked last weekend, didn’t it?

So, I think after I work on my emails this morning I am going to go read for a bit, before getting cleaned up and working on the revision and my writing. I also brought the Air home from the office, so I can also write in my easy chair if Scooter becomes too insistent with his neediness (and I think we can all reasonably assume he’s going to be a howling bitch until he gets his way this afternoon). That’s the plan, at any rate. I may watch a movie at some point this evening; Paul claims that when he gets home from the office he doesn’t want to do any more work this weekend and just wants to hang out. We shall see if that is indeed the case, won’t we?

And now, back to the spice mines.

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Better Love Next Time

Hello, Thursday morning, how are you doing?

This week went by pretty fast, I am thinking, and this is the first time in a long time I can recall not being worn out and tired. Usually Monday night I start dragging, Tuesday night I’m exhausted, Wednesday I am a little regenerated but still tired, and by the time Thursday morning rolls around I am pretty much the walking dead. But last night I stopped on the way home from work at the grocery store–where I ran into Jean Redmann AND Wacky Russian–then came home and did the laundry. I also wasn’t all that tired last night. Mentally fatigued, sure–but not physically. And I can deal with mental fatigue much easier than I can with physical.

I feel pretty decent this morning as well, which is lovely. I only have to work half a day today and tomorrow at the office, and so when I get home this afternoon I should be able to get some things done before Paul gets home. I am in the midst of some chores–the dishwasher is full and needs to be emptied; I am in the midst of two loads of laundry, and of course the filing has piled up again, which is ridiculous. I did manage to get some revising done yesterday; not much, but I do feel I am doing a really good job on this round, and Scotty’s voice is starting to emerge at last. I am hoping to get caught up this evening and tomorrow, and really get moving on it this weekend.

Fingers crossed! I also want to finish reading Devil in a Blue Dress this weekend…and since there has been so much recent publicity about it, maybe I’ll read A. J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window next.

Yesterday I got a copy of Norah Lofts’ Hauntings: Is There Anybody There? I read Lofts when I was a teenager, and mostly read her fictional biographies of queens and historical women–The Concubine, The King’s Pleasure, A Rose for Virtue, Eleanor the Queen, Crown of Aloes, How Far to Bethlehem?–and some of her ‘romances’ (I would hardly call them romances, but that was how they were marketed…I defy anyone to read Nethergate and tell me it’s a romance). She also wrote a witchcraft novel called The Little Wax Doll, which I don’t remember much about but I did enjoy reading. Somewhere recently I read an article or something on Lofts and her ghost stories…so started tracking down a copy of her collection. I read the first story yesterday between clients, and it’s called “Mr. Edward”:

If I’d been in the habit of bothering God about trivial, material things, I should have said that Miss Gould’s suggestion came as an answer to prayer. Ever since the Easter holiday I had been worried about the long one in the summer. When Tom died and I found a post as school matron and David went to boarding school, my father had said that we must spend all holidays with him. At first, though dull, they were pleasant enough; but as David grew older Father grew more critical, making outspoken remarks about the behavior of the young nowadays and accusing me of spoiling. I confess I am inclined to be indulgent during the holidays; David’s school is pretty Spartan, I don’t see him often, and I am very fond of him.

This is how the story starts, and our main character agrees to house sit and oversee renovation work being done on Miss Gould’s house for the summer. And once she and her son arrive…she begins having odd experiences around the house; small things, nothing absolutely terrifying, but very Gothic in their smallness…and Lofts shows that the little things can be just as terrifying as the BIG ones horror/supernatural tales seem to favor of late. I love the old Gothic style of scary stories, to be honest, and Lofts’ Gothic, formal writing style, reminiscent of The Turn of the Screw, is very quiet and very unsettling.

And now, back to the spice mines.

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Him

Well, we made it to Wednesday, Constant Reader. I wasn’t as tired last night when I got home from work as I usually am on Tuesday; I don’t know if I’ve rejiggered my sleep patterns or something, but it’s kind of lovely to not be so tired I can barely move on a Tuesday night. I was able to finish the laundry that’s been in process since Sunday night and finish another load of dishes so the kitchen is clean at last, rather sliding into my Wednesday morning before I run the errands on the way to work routine. What I hope this means is that this morning, I can get caught up on emails and some of the revising that has slid over the last couple of days.

I can never quite keep up, can I?

I slept extremely well last night, so this morning I do feel fantastic–at least, well-rested and ready to get this day whipped into shape. We shall see, won’t we?

Yesterday was a weird experience for me, and one of those things that absolutely illustrates how the way I was raised did not in the slightest prepare me for being a writer. I had to write a lengthy bio of myself, including everything I’ve done and accomplished in my publishing career–from writing columns to book reviews to essays to short stories to novels, as well as my work as an editor, including not just the anthologies I’ve done but the editorial work I’ve done working for publishers. I was raised to be, of all things, humble–i.e., that talking myself up and talking about my accomplishments was in poor taste; that the proper life approach was to never do such a thing. “Just do your work and let other people decide whether you’re good or not.” This is entirely self-defeating for an author. As an author, you are constantly having to promote yourself, and talk yourself up all the time. This has always made me uncomfortable. Add to that the mentality that I should be grateful for what I have and never complain…yeah, you can see how I am always at war with myself internally; these life lessons imparted by my parents are almost entirely contradictory: be grateful for what you have but at the same time aspire to more…almost as though ambition isn’t a good thing.

So, writing up a lengthy career biography of myself, intended to make me look as good as possible, made me literally squirm as I was typing it. But it wound up being nearly two pages long, and as I was doing it off the top of my head (I do not update my lengthy c.v. nearly as regularly as I should; note to self: add updating c.v. to to-do list), there were probably things that I forgot and left off–in fact, this morning I remember some freelance editorial work I’ve done that I’d completely blanked on last night–having a sieve-like memory doesn’t help in these instances. But when it was finished, I couldn’t help but be a little impressed with myself: I have accomplished a lot, and as I said, not everything I’ve done made it to the biography. Just the novel-writing alone; and then taking in to consideration the amount of novels I’ve edited…yeah, I’ve done quite a bit in what is really a very short period of time.

I know I should focus more on the positive, that I shouldn’t be afraid to be ambitious, and I shouldn’t be so reticent to talk myself up–most importantly, even if I don’t talk myself up, I most definitely should stop being self-deprecating.

That last is probably the most damaging aspect of myself.

So, writing the biography was a good thing, ultimately, even if doing it made me squirm uncomfortably. It’s not a bad thing to sit back and take stock of what you’ve done, what you’ve accomplished–provided you don’t wind up resting on your laurels. It made me want to accomplish more, actually; while a lovely reminder of what I’ve done thus far, it also reminded me of what I have yet to accomplish, what I want to accomplish.

And on that note, tis time to head back into the spice mines. Happy Wednesday, Constant Reader.

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